"Outraged by 'poor doors'? See how you like the alternatives"

"We may recoil from the idea of housing developments with separate entrances for the rich and the rest, but they are just a symptom of a much bigger problem in London"

Link to The Guardian

"Like business class air travel or first class train carriages, apartment blocks with backstreet entrances - so-called 'poor doors' - and worse facilities for residents of their cheaper flats hit a raw nerve. In London, they set in stone - or, more likely, steel and glass - the very standard class status of some Londoners compared with others, many of whom don't actually live in London at all and are just passing through.

"But while their symbolism repels, the sobering fact is that 'poor doors' at least open onto homes you don't need to be a millionaire to inhabit. They are the least endearing aspect of trade-offs between private developers and London boroughs and mayors, which have long been vital for augmenting the inadequate supply of homes that Londoners on low and even middle incomes can afford.

"Housing campaigners mock much of this 'affordable' housing as not very affordable at all, given that in some cases only households with incomes upwards of 70 grand need apply for it. The heritage lobby deride these products of 'planning gain' as bribes developers pay to be allowed to erect skyline-wrecking towers.

"Both have a point. But where else have sub-market London homes come from lately?"

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Link to The Guardian

" 'Poor doors' show why we can’t rely on developers for affordable housing"

"Reformism in local government has a Faustian history, often involving shady deals, compromised principles and unexpected outcomes as much as successful attempts to establish social justice in cities. Play your cards right and you can, like Herbert Morrison’s London county council, succeed as a paragon of moderate municipal socialist virtue.

"But if your ambitions outweigh the odds stacked against you, you’re more likely to be remembered like T Dan Smith or Derek Hatton, where the failed nature of the pact is remembered better than the houses, flats and roads that were the other results. It is always a question of degree – whether you can drag what you want out of greedy developers, cost-cutting builders, recalcitrant central government and other forces usually hostile to local democracy.

The only Faustian project worthy of the name in the UK in the last couple of decades has been Ken Livingstone’s London, one of whose unexpected legacies is now being fully realised. This is the incarnation of social segregation in one building, where instead of council housing, we have mostly private towers and estates, whose mandatory percentage of 'affordable housing' is reached by separate backdoor entrances, now being dubbed 'poor doors'.

"Ironically enough, this spatial segregation is the direct consequence of the small, piecemeal attempt made in the 2000s to make London more egalitarian."